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Posted December 6, 2017 11:00 pm - Updated December 7, 2017 08:46 am

Editorial: The lawsuit against Memorial - It’s about transparency

This news organization has made the decision to sue Memorial Health University Hospital and its parent organization Memorial Health Inc. because we strongly believe these organizations have wrongly denied access to public documents that citizens are entitled to see.

This decision was not made lightly and is about many things:

This lawsuit is about transparency. It’s about holding a hospital corporation founded under the public’s Chatham County Hospital Authority accountable to the citizens and taxpayers of Chatham County, who not only rely on Memorial as their safety net hospital but have backed it financially for decades with their tax dollars and their bonding support.

It’s about ending the ongoing brush offs and runaround given to this newspaper by Memorial Health Inc., which was created by the Chatham County Hospital Authority in 1984.

This lawsuit is about understanding how Memorial got into the dire financial condition it is in today. Memorial’s 2016 financial report showed a loss of almost $44 million, almost doubling the previous year’s loss of $22.5 million, for a combined loss of more than $66 million in only two years.

This lawsuit is about following the law and the Georgia Open Records Act.

This lawsuit is about learning how the proposed deal with Novant to acquire Memorial fell apart last year and what caused all the animosity between the Memorial board and the county-appointed Hospital Authority, which owns the hospital’s facilities and leases them to Memorial Health Inc.

This lawsuit is about learning whether there was any retaliation to anyone who opposed the Novant deal, valued at about $458 million.

The lawsuit is about what is right and wrong and not hiding information from the public while apparently trying to run out the clock as it counts down to the pending deal to sell the hospital and its operations to the for-profit, Nashville, Tenn.-based Hospital Corporation of America, in a transaction scheduled to close by year end and is valued at about $710 million.

The lawsuit is about not allowing important public records to be lost, discarded or deleted, which could happen in the transition of records to the Chatham County Hospital Authority upon the sale of the hospital.

This lawsuit is about finding out how much money has been funneled to top-dollar Atlanta law firms, as opposed to investing it to improve hospital operations and patient care. Perhaps most gallingly, these lawyers have been doing all they can to wrongly hide information about Memorial from the public.

Finally, this lawsuit is a search for the truth, whatever it might be with no preconceived notions, and following the trail to wherever this information leads.

This newspaper has been more than patient in trying to secure access to public documents from Memorial through more routine, traditional means without going to court. Unfortunately, that approach, which has gone on for several years, has been largely fruitless, as the hospital and its well-compensated lawyers continue to erect barrier after barrier to block the public’s right to know.

It raises the question: What are Memorial officials trying to hide? By their own actions, they have wrongly cloaked many of their actions and their public documents in secrecy.

This newspaper has made at least six specific and separate requests for documents from Memorial. The hospital rebuffed each one, hiding behind the thin veil that it was none of the public’s business, an argument later ripped away by the Georgia Supreme Court in the Northside Hospital open records case.

In a unanimous decision on Nov. 2, the state’s highest court issued a resounding affirmation of the decision of the Georgia Legislature to make the state’s Open Records Act apply to private entities, like Atlanta’s Northside hospital and Savannah’s Memorial Health University Hospital, that perform functions for government agencies like public hospital authorities.

Importantly the high court rejected the simplistic argument that Northside’s relationship with the Fulton County Hospital Authority was that of only landlord and tenant. Memorial officials have used that same weak argument to separate itself from the Chatham County Hospital Authority and hide public documents. Indeed, the court’s opinion found that “the hospital authority law does not allow the authority to surrender all ‘input, oversight, direction and control’ — of its public asset to a private entity.”

We strongly concur. Georgians are fortunate to have a judiciary that supports the rule of law and the public’s right to know and will stand up to big-money lawyers and do the right thing.

This newspaper has exhausted all the traditional options to acquire public documents in pursuit of important stories. At the direction of Memorial officials, we even sent a reporter to Memorial’s offices on Dec. 1 to gain access to public documents on the pending sale of Memorial to HCA that were lawfully required as part of the Georgia attorney general’s review of the sale proposal. When the reporter arrived, he wasn’t permitted to copy or take a photograph of the documents, as expected. Instead, he was coldly given a sheet of paper that stated:

“To request a copy of any information in this document please contact the Office of the Attorney General,” along with an address and phone number in Atlanta. And an attorney sat with the reporter the entire time to make sure no copies or photos were taken. What a gigantic waste of time and a fundamental lack of understanding of the sale process and governmental requirements by Memorial personnel, not to mention more wasted money, which Memorial can ill afford to lose.

It’s past time that Memorial stopped brushing off the public’s right to know in such brusque fashion. It’s time the financially struggling hospital stopped using precious hospital revenues to pay costly legal bills and instead plowed that money into improving patient care and hospital operations. And it’s way past time to cough up the public documents that are in danger of being lost forever during the HCA deal.

Georgia’s highest court has put a stop to the shameful runaround at Northside Hospital and we hope that local judges will do the same in this case.

Important principles are at stake. It’s about ensuring transparency and understanding the issues we outlined above. We strongly believe that these principles are worth fighting for and firmly reject the notion that public institutions, like Memorial Health Inc., are free to act like they are above the law.